GSLL Welcomes Three Non-Residential Ukrainian Scholars

Three scholars from Ukraine will join the department as non-residential scholars in 2025 thanks to an innovative fellowship program started at Indiana University in 2022 that has now expanded to nine Big Ten universities. With support from the Big Ten Academic Alliance, the fellowship provides a stipend to scholars who for professional, legal or personal reasons needed to stay in wartime Ukraine. In enables them to continue their research and teaching despite Russia’s invasion by giving them access to Library resources and allowing them to collaborate with US colleagues in research, teaching and publishing.

After Indiana University, Penn State is sponsoring the second greatest number of scholars of all Big Ten institutions at seven (from a total of 35). Three of these scholars will be housed in our department. They will give at least one online lecture per semester, participate in a bimonthly seminar, and an online conference. Their PSU faculty liaisons are Yuliya Ladygina, Yelena Zotova, and Adrian Wanner.

Oksana Pukhonska, an Associate Professor at The National University of Ostroh Academy whose research focuses on contemporary literature, memory and trauma studies, will investigate inherited traumatic memory in film and literary texts of the Ukrainian diaspora. Filmmaker Lesya Kalynska, the director of the award-winning 2022 documentary A Rising Fury shown at Penn State in Fall 2023, will be working on a new docuseries provisionally titled Before the Dawn (or Voices of Resilience in Ukrainian). Oleksandr Zaitsev, a Professor of History at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, will explore the relationship between Ukrainian nationalism and German National Socialism from 1930 to 1939.